From Victim to Victor (2 of 4)

Sun 25 May 2008 AM

Well I want you to just look with me in Proverbs 23:7. I want to share with you something today that's an extension of where we're at. We've been talking about identity, who am I you know, and some people don't know; I don't know who I am and it's a problem if you don't know who you are - or it's an even worse problem if you've got a wrong idea of who you are. In Proverbs 23:7 it tells us, it says as a man thinks in his heart so he is. He is. He is means his identity, so the way you think will reflect in the way you live your life. Everything about your life is an overflow of how you see yourself, so the way you see yourself is very, very important. If you see yourself as a born again child of God, a representative of God in the earth, you are part of the answer. If you don't see that, if you see something else then what happens is you'll be inevitably part of the problems that are there instead of being a great representative of God.

So we need to see ourselves the way God sees us, so we're looking at a series on identity. What I want to just pick up, something I mentioned last time I was talking, about the whole issue of victim mentality, victim mentality. Now I've taught on this. I couldn't find my notes on it so I've redone it and I think its better, but when I first taught on this issue of victim mentality the tapes went out to different places. But one guy gave it to a friend of his who owned a business in North Auckland and they were having a lot of troubles with their employees and many, many conflicts in the business. When he got the tape and listened to it he realised that the majority of the workers employed there had a victim mentality with major, major negative effects on the way they did business, did their work, treated their fellow employees and related to management.

So he implemented a program, took the message, reformed it and then wrote a program and it totally transformed their whole business. So I want to pick that up today just in the light of this area of victim mentality, so I'm going to just talk a little bit about it and I want to give you enough that you can identify if you think this way. I want to just give us God's focus because God - I want to share with you three key principles that you need to get a hold of and begin to think about. If you embrace these things they will shift how you do life, and then I'm going to try and help you understand how this mentality operates. So a victim, let's describe first of all a victim. See, a victim is a person who's suffered at the hands of other people, or suffered negative circumstances and was unable to help themselves. They couldn't prevent it. They found themselves unable to do anything about it. That's a victim.

They were at the mercy of others, they suffered at the hands of people or circumstances, and for whatever reason - sometimes it's a reason of just age - they weren't able to do anything to prevent it and so they suffered. So that's a person who's a victim. They were powerless or felt powerless to do something about it, and of course people can be victimised by physical abuse, by violence against them. Someone's attacked for example; the trauma of it often sets up a cycle of failure and victim mentality in it. Fear and all kinds of issues come into their life. A person in a home can be treated in a way that makes them feel powerless. A controlling parent will cause a child to feel powerless and they become a victim in their thinking. Some families are so - their dynamic is victim oriented and so people pick it up and then they copy the patterns they've learnt in their family.

So a victim is someone who has suffered authentically through people or circumstances, and were unable to help themself for whatever reason; may have been a child, may have been sick, may have been an accident, something like that. But a person who suffered as a victim may then adopt an attitude of life that I'm powerless and I can't help myself. It usually comes like this: it's not my fault. Someone else is to blame. It's extremely common and I want us to just lock in today onto some of the ways this operates, and then look for it. Now what they did in this firm was every one of the staff having had this list of these things of the way a victim thinks and the way a victor or a person who's an over comer thinks, they locked in on those things and got to memorise them. Then each one of the staff identified a person who thought that way and worked with them to help them transition in their thinking, and that was what shifted everything in the business. It was amazing just how it all shifted.